Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [111]
The Army was not political, not particularly clerical, not exclusively aristocratic or royalist, not necessarily anti-Semitic. Although many of its officers were all these things, the Army as a body was part of the Republic, not, like the Church, its antagonist. Despite the anti-Republican sentiments of individual officers, it accepted its role as an instrument of the state. The Republic, needing the Army, was working to make it a more serious, professionally trained body than the operatic corps of the Second Empire, which from the Crimea to Sedan plunged into battle with more dash than staff work. As a whole, the officer corps was still dominated by the graduates of St-Cyr who came largely from county families still mentally barricaded against the ideas of the Revolution. Its cult was that of a class distinct from civilians, little concerned with or aware of what was going on in the rest of the nation. It was a club loyal to its membership and cultivating its distinctiveness of which the visible mark was the uniform. Unlike British officers, who never wore uniform off duty, French officers before 1900 never wore anything else. Poorly paid, slowly promoted, drearily garrisoned for long stretches in some provincial town, their recompense was prestige: the honors, immunities and cachet of their caste; in short, the esteem in which they were held.
The esteem was great. In the eyes of the people the Army was above politics; it was the nation, it was France, it was the greatness of France. It was the Army of Revolution as of Empire, the Army of Valmy in ’92 when Goethe, watching, said, “From this day forth commences a new era in the world’s history.” It was the Army of Marengo, Austerlitz and Wagram, the Grande Armée that Lavisse proudly called “one of the most perfect instruments of war history has ever seen”; the Army of the cuirasse and saber, of the képi and pantalons rouges, of Sebastopol and the Malakoff, of Magenta and Solferino, the Army that had made France the greatest military power in Europe until the rise of Prussia, the Army of tragedy as of glory, the Army of the Last Cartridges at Sedan, of the wild cavalry charge that evoked the German Emperor’s cry, “Oh, les braves gens!” Twenty-five years later, under the never-absent shadow of Germany, the Army was both defender of the nation and instrument of revanche. It was the means of restoring, someday, the national glory. Men lifted their hats when the colonel and the colors at the head of a regiment marched by. In the words of a character whom Anatole France was satirizing—though not misrepresenting—the Army “is all that is left of our glorious past. It consoles us for the present and gives us hope of the future.” The Army was les braves gens.
In the course of the Affair it became the prisoner of its friends—clericals, royalists, anti-Semites, Nationalists and all the anti-Republican groups who made its honor the rallying cry of their own causes, for their own purposes. Caught in the trap of its early commitment to Dreyfus’ guilt, and of the forgeries and machinations by its officers to establish that guilt, the Army’s honor became synonymous with maintenance of the original verdict. It was a fort to be defended against Revision.
Resistance to Revision was grounded in the belief that to reopen the trial was to discredit the Army and a discredited Army could not